While Asus advertises the current generation Eee PC as having either a 900MHz or 800MHz Celeron processor, depending on which model you buy, the truth is Asus underclocks these chips to run at 630MHz and 570 MHz respectively. This makes sense given the Eee PC’s mediocre battery life. The faster the processor is running, the more electricity it uses and the sooner you run out of juice. But if you want a bit more oomph you might want to look into overclocking or right-clocking your device.

While there’s at least one unofficial BIOS floating around that lets you adjust your clock speed regardless of the operating system you’re using, you have a lot more control over your overclocking if you use a Windows or Linux application. If you’re running Xandros, you can check out EeeControl. The latest version of the Ubuntu Script Pack should have you covered if you’ve installed Ubuntu. And for Windows users, there’s Eeectl.

I’ve been using a Windows utility called Eeectl for a few months now to “overclock” my Eee PC so that it runs at 900MHz. But it’s also possible to tweak Eeectl’s .ini file to seriously overclock your Eee PC so that it runs at 1GHz or higher. Vito Cassisi has written an awesome tutorial explaining exactly how to obtain the best results. He also offers suggestions for adjusting the clock speed using SetFSB or using the BIOS method.

In a nutshell, what you have to do is adjust the front side bus speed and the voltage for your CPU in order to increase its overall clock speed. You can do this manually, or if you’re the trusting sort, you can download a custom .ini file Cassisi put together with several advanced clock speeds included. Using Cassisi’s file I was able to get my Eee PC up to 1.06GHz.

Of course, your battery life will suffer if you run at these higher speeds. And you run the risk of overheating your system. Fortunately Eeectl includes a built in temperature meter so you can keep track of just how hot your system is getting. If you start to approach 65C, it might be time to ramp down your clock speed a bit.

[via Asus Eee Hacks]